Kenyan coffee needs unique brand

NAIROBI: Indonesian farmers collect partly digested coffee beans from the droppings of wild civet cats. They wash, dry and sell them to buyers who in turn roast them.

The resultant coffee is billed as some of the rarest in the world. Sounds weird but ‘Kopi Luwak’ (civet coffee) or ‘poop coffee’ is probably the most expensive in the market. A cup of it costs up to Sh10,000! A kilo of the stuff goes for up to Sh300,000.

Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee costs about Sh1,600 per kilogramme. But Kenyan coffee sometimes sells at Sh3,000 in specialty markets in the west. The difference is that in Jamaica, the farmer captures a good percentage of the price. For Kenya, much of the profit is left in Europe, where very rich roasters have branded our coffee as ‘Kenya’.

The Kopi Luwak and the Blue Mountain brands are ‘specialty’ or ‘gourmet’ coffees. Simply put, specialty coffee is that which is sold as single-origin and blend.

It is also unconventional coffee that is deemed to have unusual stories with regard to how and where it is grown. For example, Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, lived in Jamaica in the 1950s and loved Blue Mountain coffee.

The Jamaicans have used this story in branding their coffee. And some people buy Blue Mountain simply because it is associated with the legendary writer.

Specialty markets require high quality coffees, to be sold in special shops rather than in the supermarkets. The markets for this type of coffee are niches, meaning the coffee is sold to non-traditional buyers.

Traditional coffee buyers are the rank and file drinkers who are just interested in good coffee. Kenya sells over 80 per cent of her coffee in the traditional market.

Paradoxically, some traders in the US and Europe sell the ‘Kenya’ coffee brand as a specialty coffee. The report recently released by the task force on coffee reforms has generally given what should be done to position Kenyan coffee in the international market. So what does this entails?

There are opportunities and threats in new markets. For specialty markets, the idea is to position our coffee as unique. Anything genuine is welcome.

Other than the ‘unique story’ strategy, there is the ‘Geographical Indication’ or GI. GI indicates that the coffee is from a special area, for instance, near the Masai Mara.

There is no reason why we cannot sell Kenyan coffee as exceptionally grown near the world-famous game parks or in the mountains by cooperatives, watched over by world famous athletes. Throw in the wildebeest phenomenon and you are on the way there.

That is more or less what Jamaica did. The Blue Mountain is a range of highlands near Kingston, just as the Aberdare or Mt Kenya; but not as majestic.

The Coffee Industry Board of Jamaica has over the years vigorously promoted coffee from the area as single origin coffee. It is today a global brand, fetching 13 times more than the ordinary coffee.

But the Kenya government has to facilitate the growers to sell coffee by associating it with a certain physical feature, for example, Mt. Kenya. There are other mountains in Jamaica, but only the coffee grown on the Blue Mountain is branded and protected.

Jamaica concentrated on the Japanese specialty market where 80 per cent of the Blue Mountain is sold. But this is not just about origin. Crucially, farmers must be helped to consistently supply high quality coffee to the specialty market.

The Government must actively market the branded coffee as a unique, even luxurious product for the specialty market. It does not come cheap though. There are transaction costs, trademark protection, registration in other countries, monitoring and salaries for administrators of the brand. There certainly will be legal costs incurred by opportunists.

Industry analysts say if small scale producers in Kenya are to enter the niche markets, they have three choices: sell to roasters through regular channels, sell to speciality roasters directly or through agents who have direct connection to specialty coffee retailers.

For now, the main weakness of the specialty market is that Kenyan farmers will still have to go through agents. Firstly, these agents have a network of thousands of small gourmet roasters and retailers who don’t have the capacity to deal directly with the farmers.

Secondly, farmers do not have the market information required to sustain direct sales. These are the same reasons why direct coffee sale (second window) has not succeeded in Kenya.

Overall, with about 70 million specialty coffee drinkers, specialty coffee retailers in the west are just too few to sustain coffee imports from Kenya. We should therefore not abandon traditional markets.

To penetrate niche markets, there must be a complete overhaul of the local coffee value chain. Finally, niches are sensitive to political instability; any whiff of violence and the market crumbles.